The Campaign for Haas

Ask the Donors

From Rice-a-Roni to
Global Investing

Kenneth Reid, PhD 82, left Georgia in 1975 to
earn his PhD in finance at Berkeley. Frances, his
new wife, joined him a year later. After graduation,
Reid co-founded Rosenberg Institutional Equity
Management with Haas Professor Barr Rosenberg.
The Orinda, Calif.-based firm was acquired by AXA
Investment Managers in 1999 and became AXA
Rosenberg, which today manages more than $70
billion in assets for approximately 300 clients. Reid
currently serves as vice chairman.

Q: What was it like coming to Berkeley in the ’70s?

Kenneth: I’d never been west of Alabama. I really
felt like an adventurer in a little green
Volkswagen Beetle driving across the
country. The most fascinating part of
the journey was the different terrain
and scenery.

Frances: I arrived in January ’77 and
landed on College Avenue, which
was wonderful — close to
campus, close to Telegraph
Avenue, on the tail end of
the hippie era. It was fascinating
for someone who
had grown up in Georgia— I’d never crossed the
Mississippi either.

Q: Why Berkeley?

Kenneth: I saw California
on television. It just felt like a
place I wanted to be— a really interesting place.
And UC Berkeley is a wellknown
university.

Q: What did you see on TV?

Kenneth: Rice-a-Roni. The
cable car. The Golden Gate
Bridge. That was it.

Q: How did you decide to
work in business rather than
academia?

Kenneth: My original
intent was to get a PhD and
then teach. However, once
I completed the program, I
discovered that I was very interested in the way financial economics interacts with
investment decision-making, so I decided to pursue something
in business.

Q: How is your firm different from others?

Kenneth: We have systematized the approach that an investment
analyst would take with stock evaluation with the objective
of being more comprehensive and extending
fundamentally based analysis to a broader set of companies.

Q: Has the economic crisis changed investing?

Kenneth: No, I think this crisis is not that different from
others. The story line changes: This one is the financial crisis,
the one before that was the dot-com crash, the one before
that was the savings and loan crash. The names and the
labels change over time, but the ingredients are the same:
Investors get to where it’s easy to get financing so they invest
and employ leverage in order to magnify the financial results.

Investors know it’s risky, but it doesn’t feel as if the risks are
really there, or the belief is that when the risks do emerge, they
will have time to move on to something else before the eceleration
phase kicks in.

Q: Is there a bright side?

Kenneth: Inside all of this, as always, are tremendous pportunities
for a young person who is getting started in business.
The opportunities are great because there is always the potential
to find a better way of managing risks while also capturing
opportunities.

When we got started in the investment business, no one
was that interested in the stock market because real estate
was king. That was ’67 through ’81. The thing that everyone
was not talking about then — the stock market — became the
big thing.

Q: Switching topics a little bit, what inspires you to give back
to Berkeley?

Kenneth: The business school has changed dramatically.
I benchmark it against what it was when I went through there.
Back then, there wasn’t a community built around the business
school. You would go to Barrows, take your classes, and then leave.
I never would have imagined all the things that have happened.
The business school feels like a community project.
Entrepreneurship, educational programs for executives — all
those different pieces are reaching out and serving different
needs within this broad community. I like to see and support all
those different onnections the school is making to various parts
of the business community.

Frances: I didn’t go to Berkeley; I went to Georgia State. But
the reason I like to give to the school is because it’s
very important for me to see a wide socioeconomic base
for the students. I don’t want to see students not able to
get a stellar education because they or their parents can’t afford
it. While Cal seems to be very committed to remaining as open
as possible, I don’t think the university can do it, particularly now,
without our help.